XII
THE RIGHT TO TRUST SOMEBODY
Democracy--as perhaps my reader will have heard me say before--democracy is a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited on in just the way kings are and in which the people arrange to have things done for them so that they won"t have to hold up their work and take the time off to do them themselves.
I try to go to the polls as I should. But I resent being obliged by my dear native country to stand up in a booth by myself with a lead pencil and know all there is to know and in a few minutes, about seventy-five men on a ticket. I do not like to feel that I am swaying the world with that yellow pencil, and that the ignorant way I feel when I am putting down crosses beside names, is the feeling other people have, that this feeling I have--in those few brief miserable moments I spend with the yellow pencil--is the feeling that this country is being governed with.
I met a man the other day as he came out from the polls who asked me who somebody was he had voted for, and he said he went on the general principle when he was up in one of those stalls of ignorance and was being stood up faithfully with nothing in his head to rule the country--he went on the general principle that every time he came on the name of a man he knew, he just voted for the other.
As a democrat and as a believer in crowds I resent the idea that being stood up and being made to vote on seventy-five names I cannot know anything about is democracy. It is tyranny. It is a demand that I do something no one has a right to make me do. I have other things every man knows I can do better and so has the man in the booth next to me, than knowing all there is to know about seventy-five names on a ticket--Smiths and Browns and Smiths and Smiths--it is a thing I want to have done for me, I want experts--engineers in human nature that I and my fellow citizens can hire to pick out my employees, _i.e._, the employees of the state that I want and that I have a right to and that I would have if I had time to stop work, study them and find them. Very often the way we don"t go to the polls in America is to our credit. It is the protest of our intelligence against the impossibility of being intelligent toward so many subjects and detectives toward so many people.
We don"t want to stop doing things we know we know, and know we can do, to vote on expert questions we don"t even want to know anything about, huge laundry-lists of people that G.o.d only knows or could know and that can only be seen through anyway by large faithful hard-working committees who devote their time to it.
If we spent nine hours a day in doing nothing else but reading papers and watching and going up and down our laundry-list of valuable persons day and night we couldn"t keep track or begin to keep track of the people we put in office. It is not our business to, it seems to many of us. Perhaps I should merely speak for myself. I can at least be permitted to say that it is not my business. If the state will give me ten men to watch, men in prominent places where they can be watched more or less naturally and easily, I will undertake to help watch them and then vote on them. What I demand and have a right to as a democrat and as a man who wants to get things for the people is that these ten men shall look after the other sixty-five and let me attend to business. The other sixty-five have a right to be looked after, criticized and appreciated by people who can do it, by men who can devote themselves to it, by men we all elect intelligently to do it for us--by men we have all looked through and through and trust.
The last year or so I have been getting about three long communications a week from the ---- Railway which has been trying to make me over into an expert on all the details of its relation to the Government. I wish I had time to know all about it. Some of us will have to. Things are so arranged just now in this country that probably if a lot of us whose business it is to travel on the railroads instead of running them don"t take a hand at it for a while and b.u.t.t in in behalf of both the railroads and the Government, there won"t be any railroads or there won"t be any Government.
But I resent having this crisis put up to me personally. I resent having a pile a foot high of things I have got to know before I can help the Government to be fair to the railroads--or the railroads to be fair to the Government. I am better anyway at writing books. I don"t want to be jerked into a judge--or a corporation lawyer because I am a voter.
Railroads always bewilder me. Even the simplest things railroads tell everybody about themselves are hard for me to understand--time-tables for instance; and why should a man who is always innocently taking Sunday trains on Monday afternoon be called on to b.u.t.t in on an expert auditor"s job in this way, beat his Congressman on the head with the poor penitent railroads--with all the details about their poor insides--and with all their back bills and things?
There must be other voters who feel about this as I do.
Is this Democracy?
This is what Democracy is to me--Democracy is a belief in the faithfulness, ability and shrewd good-heartedness of crowds and their power to select great and true leaders.
The essential fundamental principle of the democratic form of government is supposed to be that more than any other form of government on the face of the earth it trusts people. A democracy that does not trust its leaders, that does not trust even its best men, is not as democratic as a monarchy that does. Some of us seem to think that all that people can be trusted to do is to pick out men we can keep from leading us, that it"s a kind of religion to us to select men we can stop and bother. They have settled down to the idea that this is what we are like--as if the main qualification of a candidate in America is a gift of making people, of making in fact almost anybody, feel superior to him. I believe I am living in a democracy that will dare to elect experts in subjects, that will take being a statesman seriously--as a special and skilled profession, an expert engineering job in human nature, and in getting things out of people, and for people. We are getting ready for great and true leaders in America. Our people are getting ready to stake their fate in picking them out. Even our banks are. Our labor unions are. In our politics it is the masterful servants we are taking to most. Anybody can see it. There are particular things and men we want, and the first leader we have in this country who is shrewd enough about us to see that we, the people of this country, are not as vague or cartilaginous as we look, who treats us like fellow human beings, who dares to expect things of us and dares to expect to be trusted by us and who dares to keep still long enough to do things for us, will show what America is like, in spite of what she looks like, and will bring America out.
And America instead of being a kind of big slovenly adolescent, perpetually thirteen-year-old nation going around with its big innocent mouth open, will be grown up at last among the nations of the earth, will be a great clear-cut, clear-headed, firm-knit, sinewy nation that knows what it wants, and gets it--and does not say much.
XIII
THE RIGHT TO VOTE ALL DAY
This principle which I have applied in this last chapter to political democracy applies still more forcibly to democracy in industry, and to the right of the people to be waited on by skilled labor and by skilled capital.
I do not wish to bother to know everything about how everything I buy every day is made, but I do want to have arrangements made through a national league to which I belong, for instance, so that I can practically know about the conditions under which anything is made, the moment I wish to.
There should be as it were a card catalogue or authority in my town that I can go to and consult, which represents me and a hundred million people. This is my conception of what the National League through its local branches could do and do for everybody. It would only cost a few cents more to have a hundred million men know about a particular article what ten, twenty or a hundred or a thousand know, the moment they happen to need it, by looking it up in the League"s national opinion of it and national experience with it, in a card catalogue or what would operate practically as a card catalogue.
We all have the right in this country to spend our money intelligently.
If people want to get our thousand dollars a year, or two thousand a year, or three, five, or ten thousand a year, they must show cause why they should have it, dollar for dollar. We want our dollars to help people to help us, laborers who are helping the country and capitalists who are helping the country. Every time I spend ten cents I want to know that I am getting ten cents" worth of democracy, ten cents" worth of skilled capital and skilled labor working for all of us. I propose to vote with my money on the fate of my country and the fate of democracy with silver coins and with dollar bills every day. The other kind of ballot, the paper ballot, I can only use in the nature of the case once or twice a year.
XIV
THE SKILLED CONSUMER
The way to control the world and govern the well-being of men is not through the time they have left over, or the time they choose to lay one side for it, but directly and through their most important engagements and things they do and are sure to do all the time.
A man"s first important engagement in this world is with his own breath.
His second engagement is with his own stomach.
His third is with the night and with sleep.
His fourth is with posterity, with the unborn, with his children and children"s children.
His fifth is with his ancestors and with G.o.d.
In nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand things a man needs to have to keep these engagements--things he has to have if he is alive at all, he is a consumer.
What the new League will say to the consumer is something like this:
"In nine hundred and ninety-nine things out of a thousand you have to have to live, the Air Line League is organized to stand by you, express you and get the attention of everybody to what you want; and in the one thing you make for everybody it is going to express everybody to you and get your attention to what everybody wants of you."
This would seem to most of us to be fair all around.
When one thinks of it, why should one-thousandth part of what a man has and has to have, in order to live his life--the part he makes himself--be seen everywhere in this world in every man"s life holding up and bullying, making him pay high prices for, the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths?
Let the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of a man"s life take possession of the one thousandth part of him. Then we will have a civilization.
Or at least the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of him will persuade the one thousandth of him to cooperate.
We have had autocracy of capital because on the whole in the world until machinery came in, capital kept close enough to labor and to the consumer to know what the workmen and the people wanted.
Now that Capital has lost its grip, Labor announces that it is going to be after this war the autocrat, and represent capital and the consumer.
The Air Line League is here to ask, Why should not the consumer represent himself?
Capital has tried and failed and has said, "Let the public be d.a.m.ned."
Now Labor has tried and failed, and is saying hoa.r.s.ely in a thousand cities, "Let the public be d.a.m.ned."
What the Air Line League is for is to advertise the people together, and let the consumers represent themselves.
What we have been fighting for essentially in this war is the control of the consumers in the world in all nations.
When we speak of democracy and of organizing the will of the people, what we really mean is organizing the will of the consumers.